She didn't need to say a word, did she?

Ah Columbus and your weirdo street preachers. I remember when I was going to OSU where "Brother Jed and Sister Cindy" ranted to the students on the oval. One day one of their...followers (?) jumped out from behind a tree and landed right in front of me, pointed at me with a vicious look on his face and bellowed, "FORNICATOR!!!"

I was startled by the nutball but I just reacted with "I WISH!" and shrugged and walked around him. I heard laughing as I walked away.

Re: Oh man, that little girl is awesome.

In fairness to King James here, him and his little translation team were very diligent in their scholarly faithfulness to the best of their ability to honestly depict the content they had been given, the damage of "what shall we put in the Bible" being done around 1000 years before King James and his team got there.

the poor King is largely doing his own translation because he's being bothered by some nutty puritans which is why it's such a fair version cause he needs it to be accepted as scholarly accurate for all parties to not kick up a fuss. He's doing it to counter the 1600s version of US Neo-Conservatives so I have some sympathy for him, especially as his chief method of attack is printing lots of books.

Lots of the Kings had "favourites" and King James definitely shared a bed with some of them. Kings having male lovers isn't as much of a problem as you'd think it would be as long as they aren't stupid about it. Like Richard the Lionheart, I'm fairly certain the nutty Neo-Nazi Crusades types don't know about him being pretty clearly bisexual either.

I'm of the opinion that you should let US public schools teach that the Bible is literally word for word true but only in the original greek [with latin and other ancient languages for context and second hand sources] If it's literally true you need to go literally to the source and not accept translations or else there's no point.

.....if the Religious Right want to extensively fund the education of Ancient Greek to 7 year olds I welcome that funding intervention.

I think they'd go for it if you labelled it "christian education" -- using the Bible as the basis of your Elementary education isn't the worst idea ever, I could make that work. My American friend doesn't like me saying the Bible isn't literally true, so when we were at the British Museum last week I was describing things in terms of the Bible. i.e this is what the Tower of Babel civilization looked like, this is what Jericho would have looked like and it became pretty obvious, pretty quickly that she didn't know what I was talking about as she's not actually read the Old Testament. Plus not actually being able to recognise early Christian symbols on roman and saxon artefacts. It's a clear, clear disconnect, and if America's "Christian Heritage" were being taught it would open up so much more learning in terms of pre 1500 history. She didn't know what "AD" meant either. I'm perfectly happy to introduce "Biblical History" into schools because at least then there's some discussion about the Ancients.

That little girl said so much in her quiet rebellion, that I actually have no idea what the cray-crays were saying! Good for her! And I absolutely adore your response to the person who so rudely accosted you.

Wooooooowwww you had some crazies on your campus! My undergrad had a few religious groups but most of them were pretty chill and were only out at the beginning of the year to recruit new members. And there was one guy who would routinely hand out pocket bibles to passersby but he never seemed to mind if nobody took one.

Now that I think about it though, there was once a crazy guy downtown (not technically part of campus but close enough that it was about 95% students passing through) who spent a day shouting at passing women for being dressed too provocatively and how birth control is proof that all women are sluts, weird shit like that. Never stated any obvious religious affiliation, just a general misogynist I guess. IIRC, he was only there a day before a group of guys from one of the better frats got together and ran him out of town. He never came back after that.